She was my friend. My very good friend, for many years. We shared two houses together. In one duplex she lived upstairs, me and my kids downstairs. The next duplex was side-by-side. She had four kids when I met her, I had two. We both had baby daddy drama. Both houses had a front and back yard, and our kids would run around and play together. My daughter’s birthday and her son’s birthday were in the same week. One year we had a combined party, and it was so much fun. There were a million kids there, both our families, and in the back yard Michelle put up a pinata. It was a blast.

We were both poor and scrounging. Once in the first house my electricity got cut off. My folks, who could have, wouldn’t help me. At first. While they ravaged me with words about how irresponsible I was, Michelle quietly put a couple of extension cords together and ran them down from an outlet from upstairs so that I could at least have a lamp on. Ashamed in the face of such kindness, my parents lent me the money to pay my electric bill.

The next year when I got my tax return, I gave her $100 to repay her. She seemed so surprised, and tried to refuse the money. Michelle was like that, very giving and not expecting anything in return. She was always helping me with stuff. I could depend on her to watch my kids and vice versa. Although our parenting styles were very different she loved her kids, fiercely, and I learned a lot from her. She was very good to my children, I trusted her with them.

I don’t know what happened to our friendship. Although we practically lived together we still ran in separate circles, had different types of friends. Her boyfriends were all “ballers” and lived on the edge, the entire time I knew her I was with Brian, a “punker”. She thought my other friends were weird, I didn’t know what to think of some of her friends.

I attributed the big break-up to jealousy. She seemed to act different after Brian and I got married. As we were strengthening our relationship she was dating a new man every other week. We kept on going to college through all kinds of hardship, she did a semester or two at community college and stopped going. I put my daughter into an expensive private school, she had no alternative but to keep her kids in the ratty public one. I thought she was just jealous, and ignored her smart comments and thinly veiled insults until my anger at her could not be contained and we fought, viciously and nastily for all the world to hear, shocking even our loud ghetto neighborhood into silence.

We almost came to blows.

Right there in the yard, with our kids and the neighborhood kids looking on, I wanted to kick her ass. I wanted to knock her down and spit in her face. I hated her. I stood on my porch and hated her, hated her screaming and yelling obscenities at me. I looked down at her and wanted to leap off my porch and land with both feet squarely in her face. She looked like she wanted to kill me, to kick my ass. Though this anger shook me to my core, Reason won out. I stopped in mid-scream and walked back into my house, collecting my children on the way. I shut the door and cried.

I haven’t really talked to her since.

She called me a week later but again, we ended up cussing and screaming at each other. I hung up on her first. She called back and hung up on me.

The kids nit-picked each other for awhile, but made up. They were scared to play together, though. This breaks my heart. Soon she moved away.

A few years after that, when one of my sisters was in town she saw Michelle at a mall. They talked of this and that. She told my sister she has another baby. This hurt me like a wound, why didn’t she come find me, does she hate me that much? I would have been there for her, I would have helped her. But I did nothing to find her, because my sister told me she was with her same old friends. Maybe she didn’t need me or want my friendship, maybe her friends would laugh at me again behind their long acrylic nails.

But maybe she thinks of me often, too. Maybe her and her kids look in their photo album and say, “Do you remember when we lived in the house with Iyende and Scott and baby Todd? Remember Trula fed us seaweed all the time and Brian would pull the basketball hoop in the street and everybody would come down to play? Remember all the birthday parties and sleepovers? How come you’re not friends with Trula anymore, mommy?

If I ever see her again I will hug her and tell her how much I miss her. I miss our friendship, I miss her kids. I know how to find her, I know where one of her good friends live. I think I will stop by and ask her to please give Michelle my phone number. Maybe she misses me, too.

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